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Getting your site ready for Drupal 8

The drumbeat has started. On an almost daily basis, I'm asked How do I get my site ready for Drupal 8? Here is my best answer. If you go dutifully through this list, your site will be in peak condition when Drupal 8 is released.

Start giving your administrators a taste of D8 now

Significant parts of Drupal 8 are already available for Drupal 7. These modules are not quite as strong as their D8 counterparts, but they are a great investment you can make today.

Get your admins excited about their future by installing Navbar module. This is a mobile-friendly administration toolbar. It replaces the toolbar module that comes with Drupal 7.

The Ember theme works nicely with Navbar, and will be available immediately when D8 is released.

Install ckeditor, the WYSIWYG editor for Drupal 8. Start learning the authoring system that has been greatly improved in Drupal 8. All your customizations should migrate smoothly when you upgrade.

If the module has been superseded by a better module, consider using new shiny one in Drupal 8. Migrate module makes it relatively easy to move data to a new module.

Another alternative is to look for a third-party service to replace an unavailable module. For example, one could move mapping to Mapbox, spam blocking to Mollom, and search to Acquia Search.

Remove code hacks

Most Drupal sites eventually hack core or contrib files. That can be a reasonable remedy for a pressing bug or missing feature. However, hacks can lie around in a codebase long after they are needed. For example, you are now an older and wiser Drupal dev and you know how to accomplish your change without a hack. Go ahead and do that, so that you can cleanly upgrade your module and not lose your "improvements." Contribute back useful hacks to drupal.org so you can run a clean module again.

Review your theme

Themes can be a convenient place to do all sorts of unholy things. Move code that belongs in page building to an alter hook or similar. Simplifying your theme in this way will make the upgrade to D8 Twig easier.

I think this is a really good list. I would add that whilst
developing the SensioLabsUK site I found that getting involved on the
Drupal IRC channels and attending the core mentoring office hours was
also really beneficial. Learning about the Drupal core and how
it's changing in D8 makes porting your own themes and modules
much easier.

Are there any recommendations for going from D6 to D8? E.g., steps
one could take to make it easier to move to CMI, to make the migration
easier, ... A lot of the advice could be translated to D6, but
I'm wondering if you have any tips specifically for D6.

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